Abstract

Abderrahmane Sissako's celebrated Bamako (2006) stages a public trial of the debt policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Africa in a shared courtyard in Bamako. By putting both western and African film aesthetics and modes of spectatorship also on trial through formal strategies of address and mise en scène, it appears a stylised return to the politically engaged social realism of Ousmane Sembène. Yet, by allowing an astonishing array of matter (human and non-human, real and fictional) to drift graphically into its frame and intrude into the very law of the economic and geopolitical, Bamako also insists on material process and aesthetic friction, opening up new hybrid spaces of spectatorial speculation and interpretation in postcolonial art cinema not bound by the demands of allegory and ideological thinking. Focusing in close detail on the intricate, self-reflexive rifts and fractures of montage in two discrete episodes (an extended scene of migration testimony, a suicide followed by funeral procession), the author shows how Sissako’s poetic investment in form not only exposes but also directly resists the hegemonic violence the film implacably relates. Such formations of violent beauty demand we reconceive the very nature of political aesthetics and the function of screen violence.

摘要

Abderrahmane Sissako 著名的巴马科 ( Bamako ) (2006) 在巴马科的一个共用院子里对国际货币基金组织和世界银行在非洲的债务政策进行了公开审判。通过正式的演讲和场面调度策略，将西方和非洲的电影美学和观众模式也置于试验之中，这似乎是对 Ousmane Sembène 政治参与的社会现实主义的程式化回归。然而，通过允许一系列惊人的物质（人类和非人类，真实的和虚构的）以图形方式进入其框架并侵入经济和地缘政治的法则，巴马科还坚持物质过程和审美摩擦，开放后殖民艺术电影中观众推测和解释的新混合空间，不受寓言和意识形态思维要求的束缚。在两个不连续的情节（移民证词的扩展场景，自杀之后的葬礼游行）中详细关注蒙太奇的错综复杂，自我反省的裂痕和断裂，作者展示了 Sissako 对形式的诗意投资如何不仅暴露而且直接抵制影片无情地涉及的霸权暴力。这种暴力美的形成要求我们重新思考政治美学的本质和屏幕暴力的功能。